Are Cover Letters Necessary?
As many other students, I browse through multiple companies’ job application requirements on a weekly basis. I find the job-seeking process a tremendously time consuming one, with the tailoring of my personal letter to every organization as the most time demanding component.
The above being a one-page letter containing unique arguments for one’s application, along with passions, accomplishments and commitments implies a time-consuming procedure in its creation. Despite understanding that it is an opportunity to differentiate oneself from the crowd and showcase one’s personality and enthusiasm, I find it fairly unlikely that the person who scrutinizes the letter reads it properly, considering that they usually have 40 other candidates in line for the job. In fact, according to a study, 58% of employers regard personal letters as unnecessary. With this said, I often feel that the hour spent on writing the letter is time wasted.
My impression is that the kind of jobs that I tend to apply for regard concrete work experience and education, which are often stated on one’s CV, as more important in comparison to the less objective characteristics, such as passion and enthusiasm, that the personal letter often serves to express. However, I still understand that in many professions, such as for sales representatives, personal qualities such as high energy, personality, and extraversion, may be both essential in a candidate and hard to express through a CV per se.
Still, for the jobs that many other SSE students apply for, such as management consulting jobs, it is my impression that factual experiences conveyed through a CV weigh greater than a couple lines about one’s commitment expressed in the personal letter. This takes me to my main point about personal letters – they often contain a lot of unnecessary junk. With this, I mean that although a person may apply for a job because of less nice-looking reasons, such as high salary, he or she will likely frame him/herself as passionate, driven, and ambitious in the personal letter anyway. Therefore, it is hard to distinguish truths from lies in letters and to compare who is the best fit for a job when most applicants' letters do not represent a truthful picture of their skills and personality.
Although many employers likely have developed a trained eye for distinguishing positive commendations from genuine passion among the applicants, numerous are likely still misled by individuals who disingenuously appear to be passionate in their letters. It is very easy to frame oneself as being enthusiastic for a job even when one is not, making it appear silly that this should be part of the application process, perhaps turning it instead into a competition of who can make up the most seamless lies.
I assume that cover letters could function as a filtering system when deciding who to offer an interview in the case of similar applicants. However, if employers regard other things than concrete evidence for how well one fits for a job, a fair assessment of applicants can probably only be made by calling everyone to interviews, something which I also understand takes time.
All this being said, I rarely feel that the effort put into writing cover letters pays off in cases when concrete knowledge and experiences conveyed by a CV in fact matter the most. At the same time, I understand the function that personal letters aim to play, even though their information may be factually irrelevant. Therefore, I think that employers who use cover letters should think twice about what role they play in the application processes. Shorter video meetings where the applicant answers personal questions and interacts with the employer may bring a fairer picture of the applicant to the employer and spare us the process of writing personal letters every time we apply for a job.
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